Afghanistan Hazing Cases Echo ‘A Few Good Men’

Last weekend, the remaining soldiers deployed as part of U.S. combat missions in Iraq came home to the welcoming arms of their families. But tens of thousands of American troops remain in the field in Afghanistan. And, as the longest war in our nation’s history continues into the new year, commentators are noting unsettling parallels between the controversial deaths of two soldiers fighting in that campaign — both of them young Asian Americans — and the plotline of 1992’s classic military courtroom drama, “A Few Good Men.”

In the film, Navy Judge Advocate General Lt. Danny Kaffee (Tom Cruise) is charged with defending two soldiers accused of conducting a lethal “Code Red” — extrajudicial punishment — of a soldier who’s been targeted for discipline, PFC William Santiago. As he investigates the soldiers’ actions, he realizes the Code Red could only have been ordered from the top. Lt. Kaffee places the base commander, Col. Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson), on the stand and corners him into admitting that he authorized the Code Red, in a monologue that the American Film Institute has dubbed one of the greatest of the past century: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!,” shouts Jessep, while declaring that Santiago’s death — though tragic — was right, necessary and likely saved other soldiers’ lives.

On April 3, Lance Corporal Harry Lew of the U.S. Marines, a native of Santa Clara, Ca., took his own life after reportedly being subjected by his squadmates to humiliation, beatings and forced exercise in full gear, after he was said to have been found asleep while on guard duty in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He shot himself with his rifle in a foxhole that his fellow soldiers reportedly had forced him to dig while taunting him and pouring sand on his head. According to a report in the Associated Press, the incident occurred after the squad’s leader, Sgt. Benjamin Johns, told Lew’s fellow lance corporals that “peers should correct peers.”

After an investigation into the circumstances of Lew’s death, Johns and two of Lew’s squadmates have been charged with assault, wrongful humiliation and maltreatment, and are scheduled to face a court martial in the months to come. Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Hill, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Pacific, declined to provide details about the ongoing legal process, stating that “the Marine Corps prides itself on holding its members to the highest levels of accountability, and does not tolerate hazing of any kind.”

Just a month after the results of the investigation into Lew’s death were announced, on October 3, Army private Danny Chen was found dead in a guard tower in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. The private, born and raised in New York’s Chinatown, had apparently shot himself following what was reported to have been an extended session of hazing after he left a water heater on following a shower — a stretch of abuse that was said to include physical battering, coerced exercise under painful conditions and verbal harassment, including repeated racial slurs.

Eight members of his squad have since been charged with a range of offenses, from assault to negligent homicide and involuntary manslaughter, and could face courts martial based on the results of a continuing inquiry. Christopher P. Grey, a spokesperson for the Army Criminal Investigation Command, says that the Army cannot comment to protect the integrity of their ongoing investigation, but called the circumstances “tragic” and and assured that “CID will continue to conduct a professional and very thorough investigation.”

“A Few Good Men” is fiction, of course, but it’s fiction rooted in reality. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin penned the script and the play it was based on from conversations he had with his JAG lawyer sister Deborah, who was working on a high-profile “Code Red” case at the time. The defendants in that 1986 case, Marines PFC John Palermo, Lance Corporal R.W. Peterson and Lance Corporal David Cox, had been charged with assaulting their squadmate, PFC William Alvarado, under circumstances very similar to those in the film.

In 2002, David Iglesias — a member of the defense team and then the newly appointed U.S. Attorney for New Mexico — told the Associated Press that the case was far from unique. “You’ve heard it called other things: The G.I. shower, the blanket party,” he said. “The Code Red is an old tradition in the armed forces.”

And indeed, hazing has long been a part of military training and service. Though the official line is that there is a zero tolerance policy of a practice that, as U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey posted on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, “undermines everything the military stands for,” the reality is that the armed forces allow and encourage “corrective measures” that include, in the case of Army rules, “verbal reprimands and a reasonable number of repetitions of authorized physical exercises.”

The line between corrective measures and hazing can be a fine one. And the uncomfortable truth is that the line is usually crossed when the individual in question doesn’t “fit in.” A classic cinematic example is obese, clumsy Private Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” dubbed “Gomer Pyle” by Sergeant Hartman, memorably played by former Marine drill instructor R. Lee Ermey. After being subjected to an endless stream of abuse from Hartman and a late-night “blanket party” beating at the hands of his fellow trainees, Lawrence experiences a psychotic break, killing Hartman and then himself.

It’s not surprising that in the military, as in most physically rigorous and competitive situations, people who aren’t like everyone else are the ones who tend to get harassed. But it’s one thing when those differences are based on whether someone can pull his or her weight. It’s another when other factors — like race, ethnicity or religion — are part of the reason for a soldier’s ostracization and abuse.

Before 1973, the draft ensured that the armed forces were composed of a relatively diverse cross-section of the U.S. population. But ever since the turn to an all-volunteer army, the makeup of the services has become more and more demographically skewed. The numbers of whites and blacks in the military have swelled, while Asians and Hispanics have become increasingly underrepresented. The geographical origins of those serving have also experienced a sharp shift, with the vast majority of enlistees coming from rural areas in the West and South, which together now supply about two-thirds of all enlisted recruits, up from just over half in 1973. This has in turn been reflected in a rise in the percentage of soldiers who describe themselves as fundamentalist or evangelical Christians — about 40% of all active-duty soldiers identify as evangelicals, versus 14% of the U.S. population at large.

“You now have a much less diverse army, one whose culture is very southern, very Christian and very white,” says military activist and former Army Lieutenant Dan Choi. “And anyone who’s a minority in that culture has to accept that they’re an outsider if they want to survive, and try their best to fit in. If you’re different in any regard, you stick out. And the Asian saying applies: The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.”

The low ratios of Asian Americans and Hispanics in today’s armed forces don’t reflect a lack of patriotism on the part of those communities: Each has a long and illustrious history of military service. The Japanese American 442nd Infantry Regiment during World War II suffered more casualties and received the most decorations for valor of any unit in U.S history. Meanwhile, the 300,000 Mexican Americans who served during the Second World War were proportionately awarded more military honors than any other ethnic group.

But two-thirds of Asian Americans and 40% of Hispanics are foreign-born. And among immigrants, the desire to see their children pursue secure professions is particularly strong.

“When I told my mom I wanted to go to West Point, she became hysterical,” says Choi. “‘Why would you want to do that? ‘Be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an engineer!’ she screamed. And my brother was just as incredulous. He said, ‘Why would you want to go to West Point? It’s 80 percent white. There are no Asians there.’ And I told him that’s exactly why I need to go. We need to visibly show that we’re a part of the American fabric.”

Choi would later become the face of the fight against the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that barred out gays and lesbians from serving in the military. “But when I was at West Point, I wasn’t openly gay — I was openly Asian,” he says.

His goal was to inspire other Asian Americans to serve, and he succeeded: After 9/11, when Choi was in his third year at West Point, his brother enlisted in the Army and joined the Special Forces. “We actually were in Iraq together,” says Choi.

The stories of Harry Lew and Danny Chen echo parts of Choi’s account. Their parents resisted their decision to join the military. Yet both soldiers were driven to enlist by a desire to give back to the country of their birth, and to do something that they thought too few of their peers were doing.

“I tried to stop him, I told him the military is very dangerous,” Lew’s father, Allen Lew, told the Los Angeles Times. “He just told us he wanted to serve his country.”

“When Danny joined the Army, I didn’t want him to go,” said Danny Chen’s mother, Su Zhen Chen, at a press conference at the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association. Chen told his father that the Army was in line with the career he hoped to pursue in the future — joining the NYPD. In both cases, it was all about “catching bad guys,” he’d said.

But Lew and Chen, children of immigrants and the only members of their extended families to serve in the military, had no firsthand sources of information about what it would be like in the armed forces. As raw 19-year-olds, their idea of being a soldier was more likely to have come from videogames like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor than movies like “The Hurt Locker” or “Restrepo” — or, for that matter, “Full Metal Jacket” and “A Few Good Men.”

And once they got there, they found themselves in a situation where they were the odd man out, in a high-pressure situation, with peers who regularly heaped scorn on them for their failures — and, at least in the case of Chen, apparently used ethnic slurs to drive their contempt home.

“I wish I could say I was surprised, but there’s a long tradition of using race to harass people in the military,” says Bruce Yamashita, who faced racial prejudice and discrimination as an officer candidate in the Marines and successfully fought a legal battle that ended up with his receiving an apology and a long-delayed commission as a captain from the Corps in 1994.

Though Yamashita never experienced physical abuse, he says that his time at the Officers Candidate School was marked with a constant barrage of racial attacks. “The drill sergeants would turn to me and say things like, ‘During World War II we whipped your Japanese ass’ and ‘You speak English? We don’t want your kind around here. Go back to your country!,’” he says. “The thinking is, ‘If you can’t take a little ethnic joke, how can you fight an enemy’? And the problem is that a little joke can soon spiral into something with much more serious consequences, as we found out with Danny Chen.”

The irony is that Yamashita and his peers, like every cadet who graduates from West Point, the OCS at Fort Benning, the Air Force Academy or the Naval Academy at Annapolis, probably discovered that one of their earliest tasks was to memorize a quote called “Schofield’s Definition of Discipline.” At a hundred and fifty words, it’s the longest stretch of text that most would-be military leaders have ever learned by heart — but it’s considered so important that junior cadets are often stopped in the halls and asked to recite it on the spot by their elders.

It begins like this: “The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy than to make an army.”

What’s often overlooked is that the lines are an excerpt from a much longer address given by Lieutenant General John M. Schofield, then serving as West Point’s commanding officer, to the graduating class of 1879. The reason for his speech was to inform the class that certain acts and behaviors that he’d observed, that in fact had been ingrained into the very tradition of military instruction, were morally intolerable, and just as importantly, unproductive to the creation of gentleman soldiers.

“The practice of hazing is both injurious and humiliating to its victims and degrading to those who engage in it,” he declared, warning that it could have a permanent effect, on both the target’s character and the military’s esprit de corps: “The memory of ill-treatment will remain with its victim as long as he lives. You can never be a ‘brother officer’ to him whom you once degraded.”

Only eight months later, Johnson Chesnut Whittaker — the sole black cadet enrolled at West Point, and just the third ever to attend — was discovered, bruised, bloodied and unconscious on the floor of his room, his arms and legs tied to his cot. Whittaker told the duty officer that he’d been beaten in his sleep by fellow cadets; the administration instead accused him of faking the attack, and had him expelled.

No charges were ever brought against any of Whittaker’s fellow cadets. But a subsequent investigation into the circumstances around the case did claim a victim: John M. Schofield, who was removed from his position as West Point superintendent in 1881.

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